Twenty years later, bank slayings haunt Valley

PHOTO GALLERY: It was the bloodiest bank robbery in Lehigh Valley history. Martin Appel and Stanley Hertzog charged into the First National Bank of Bath in East Allen Township on June 6, 1986, and started shooting. Three bank employees died and two other people were seriously injured.

(Morning Call file photos)

Matt AssadOf The Morning Call

As the Northampton County District Attorney stands among the crowd that spills out of St. Anne's Church in Bethlehem after Mass, a woman with gray hair tucked under her Sunday-best hat walks up.

John Morganelli knows what's on her mind.

''When are they going to kill Martin Appel?'' she asks, a question Morganelli says she poses almost monthly. ''When are we going to get this over with?''

The answer is that Appel, serving three life sentences in the state prison at Green County, will never be executed. And for many, the aftereffects of what he did on June 6, 1986, will never die.

Not for the loved ones of the three people who were killed as Appel and his accomplice, Stanley Hertzog, rampaged through the First National Bank of Bath. Not for the wounded survivors whose lives are indelibly scarred. Not even for some of the residents in the quiet farming community that surrounded the bank branch in East Allen Township.

And certainly not for Morganelli, who despite a personal record of 14-0 in murder trials, will always regard Appel's escape from execution as the one that got away. He was not district attorney during the murder case in 1986, but that he couldn't prevent Appel's sentence of execution from being overturned still hounds him.

So visible are the scars left on many in the Lehigh Valley by that day two decades ago that Morganelli spent part of the last four years writing a book detailing the crime and chronicling how he believes Appel manipulated the legal system to escape lethal injection.

Some may argue ''The D-Day Bank Massacre,'' to be released in October, will only reopen wounds, but Morganelli said that for some, those wounds have never really healed.

The deadliest robbery in Lehigh Valley history has left behind a legacy of torment. Like the day President Kennedy was assassinated, and the morning terrorists struck the World Trade Center, almost everyone who was in the Lehigh Valley back then remembers what they were doing the moment they heard Appel and Hertzog had struck the First National Bank of Bath.

''Everywhere I go, people still ask me about Appel,'' Morganelli said. ''Other crimes fade as time passes, but this one seems to stay with people. For a lot of people, what happened that day is still fresh in their minds.''

Kill all witnesses

Appel, a former Army lieutenant, would call what happened that day a ''mission'' and Morganelli would call it the most horrific crime in recent Lehigh Valley history.

Appel, 28, and Hertzog, 29, stormed into the First National Bank of Bath branch at Route 329 and Airport Road at 11:13 a.m. Just 13 minutes earlier, hoping to create a diversion for state police, Appel had phoned in a bomb threat at what is now Lehigh Valley International Airport. He ended the call with the phrase ''Die American pigs.''

Appel, who had gone AWOL from a military base in West Germany six years earlier and since then had been charged with impersonating a police officer, had hatched a plan not only to rob the bank, but also kill all witnesses.

Once in the bank, Appel and Hertzog asked two tellers for change for bills. As the tellers made change, the men made no demands for money and passed no notes — they just started shooting.

Appel, a thinly-built taxi driver with thick-rimmed glasses that made him resemble Woody Allen, fired one shot into Janice Confer, a 48-year-old mother of two from East Allen Township, and then fired two shots from his 9 mm handgun into teller Hazel Evans, a 55-year-old mother of three from Coplay. Teller Jane Hartman, a 33-year-old mother raising two children in Catasauqua, curled into a fetal position under her desk as Appel sprayed bullets throughout the bank.

He soon returned to her desk, firing two deadly shots into Hartman's back, and then a second fatal shot into the motionless Confer.

''I don't know why she tried to hide,'' a remorseless Appel would say of Hartman during a death row interview with The Morning Call two years later. ''I just held the gun over the desk and POW. POW. She was dead.''

Within minutes, three dead

Thomas Marchetto, a 37-year-old Marine Corps veteran with four children in East Allen Township — the only customer in the bank — earlier had crumpled to the floor when a bullet pierced his leg. He remained there, feigning death in the hope that the killers would think they had carried out their plan.

He flinched as Appel fired another bullet into his arm, and he lay there wondering if Appel would come back to finish him off.

''It seemed that the longer the shooting went, the less the screams,'' Marchetto testified during Appel's trial. ''I remember saying to myself, 'Don't panic, don't panic. What do I do if he comes back? Should my eyes be open, should they be closed.' And I remember saying, 'No God, not now. I have four children.'''

Appel did not return.

''I thought about executing him right there,'' Appel, in 1988, said of Marchetto. ''But there was too much to do.''

Just as 31-year-old bank manager Marcia Hauser wondered who set off firecrackers in the lobby, Hertzog rushed into her office, bullets spraying from his Colt .38-caliber revolver. One bullet grazed her shoulder and a second hit her knee as she fell back into her chair. As Hauser struggled to find an alarm beneath her desk, Hertzog fired again. The bullet went past Hauser's outstretched wrists and into her left temple.

Meanwhile, Helene Farah and Kevin Koontz, who were working in a back office, fled through a rear door.

Appel and Hertzog grabbed $2,280, most of it in a 50-pound bag of change. They left $16,000 behind at the bank, and sped off as at least one person recorded the license plate of Appel's brown Chevrolet Monte Carlo.

The motive was money. Appel's job was to kill people and Hertzog's was to collect the loot. Appel would later contend that he carried out his mission rather efficiently, while Hertzog failed.

In just three minutes, Evans, Hartman and Confer were dead. Critically wounded Hauser and Marchetto would leave the bank on stretchers.

Escapes death penalty

News of the robbery spread as police set up roadblocks and state police helicopters searched from above.

Appel and Hertzog were arrested three hours later. They had briefly stopped at the dingy brown trailer where Appel lived in Moore Township, but soon after were stopped at a roadblock on Indian Trail Road.

Hertzog, who would later say he was manipulated by the more intelligent Appel, pleaded guilty to murder and received three life sentences. He is in the the state prison in Huntingdon County.

At his trial, Appel referred to the people he killed as ''obstacles in my way,'' declined the help of court-appointed attorneys, defended himself, pleaded guilty and boldly asked to be put to death. In 1993, Morganelli sued Gov. Robert P. Casey — a death penalty opponent — for not signing Appel's warrant.

In February 1995, newly elected Gov. Tom Ridge signed Appel's death warrant and, less than two weeks later, Appel filed a suit seeking to overturn his conviction. A federal court judge ultimately overturned the conviction, arguing that Appel did not get proper representation and may not have been competent enough to decline it.

Morganelli, who didn't become district attorney until six years after the robbery, chose not to retry Appel, instead accepting a 2002 guilty plea that spared his life but will keep him behind bars forever.

The DA has spent the four years since the plea writing his 192-page book, titled after Appel's claim that he chose June 6 because it is the anniversary of the 1944 Normany invasion. In it, Morganelli details how Appel took advantage of Hertzog's habit of being a follower, and then spent a month planning the attack like a military invasion.

It talks about Appel's claim that had he not left his gun in his trailer, he would have killed the state troopers who stopped him. It also details how, even from his death row cell, Appel tried to intimidate Marcia Hauser by sending her a letter, just to prove he knew where she lived.

In the end, Morganelli writes that despite all of Appel's bravado in initially seeking his own death, he was really just a coward playing with the system.

Appel did not respond to a request by The Morning Call to be interviewed.

''He'll never leave prison,'' Morganelli said. ''But in this case, justice was not served. Martin Appel should be dead by now.''

Still recovering

Marcia Hauser, now 51 and living in Forks Township, doesn't need a book to remind her of that day. She lives it daily, in the right eye that no longer has sight, in the jolt of fear that overtakes her when she hears fireworks and in the bullet fragments still lodged in her brain.

She never returned to work — her career as a young bank manager snuffed in an instant — and the brain injury has left her forgetful and sometimes confused, she said.

A trip to the grocery store can exhaust her, she has never regained feeling in the left side of her face and she still sees doctors several times a week. But she enjoys living in a newly-built upscale neighborhood with her 14-year-old daughter, Jessica. This year, Hauser began to volunteer for a civic group, and, for the first time, she sees a future that may allow her to return to work.

But she can't see a future when she's put the robbery behind her.

''I used to get frustrated, but now I've accepted that it's something I will always have to live with,'' said Hauser, who finds joy in playing billiards and walking her dogs. ''I've become very determined. I will work again and I will be happy. I'm not going to let Martin Appel ruin what's left of my life.''

To mark the anniversary, employees at what is now a Sovereign Bank branch planned to place flowers at the bank entrance, beneath the plaque that greets customers by remembering those who were killed and injured in the robbery. The bank looks different today — the desk areas where the three clerks were killed have been moved farther from the door. Still, the story of the robbery has found its way through three name changes and four owners.

Last year, when manager Kathy Miranda was interviewed for the job, she was told about the robbery and asked if she would be comfortable working there.

'What if?'

Charles Beynon of East Allen Township was a state trooper who responded to a false alarm at the bank just hours before the robbery. He returned later on personal banking business to find it had been robbed. He said that had he not been in court for a hearing, he may have been in the bank around 11 a.m. Even today, the thought of ''what if?'' chases him.

''I've always wondered if I would have been able to save those people,'' said the now-retired 29-year trooper. ''But another part of me wonders if I would have just been the first person shot. I think about that day all the time.''

Helene Farah understands Beynon's torture. She frequently recalls the terror she felt as she fled the bank with the sound of gunfire ringing behind her. Her husband wonders why she can't put it in the past, and she admits that, like Beynon, she can't seem to escape those thoughts of ''what if?''

She was moments from leaving for lunch with Hartman. Would Hartman still be alive if she had left a few minutes sooner, she wonders. Or would her own escape have been impossible had she left the back room to meet Hartman at the wrong time?

After 20 years, the images of the robbery haven't faded, nor has the day she took the stand against Appel during his trial.

''I think about it a lot more than people can imagine,'' said Farah, of Coopersburg. ''I'll never forget the look he gave me in court. The way he stared, I could tell exactly what he was thinking: 'I wish I had killed you, too.'''

Beverly Drovich wasn't in the bank that day and never worked there. Still, she can't seem to shake her fear of what happened. A friend of two employees who were killed, Drovich has since moved to Palmerton, taking with her a phobia for banks.

''Each time I drive by that bank, it's like going past the 9/11 site,'' Drovich said. ''The terrible sadness is that vivid, even now. I still can't go into banks. What happened that day shook an entire community. A lot of us will never get over it.''